The present invention relates to an apparatus for treating a cloth such as knitted, woven and non-woven ones with the use of low-temperature plasma.
In treating a cloth industrially, there are a process of scouring prior to dyeing, in which water repellent foreign matters adhering to the cloth is removed or made into hydrophilic for permeating a dye solution easily in the cloth an a process of finishing after dyeing, in which such characteristic properties as softness, water repellency, resistance against electrostatic and resistance against staining are applied to the cloth, and these processes have conventionally been done in an aqueous system.
For instance, in scouring a cloth containing cotton, it is necessary to treat the cloth with an alkaline scouring solution containing such an agent as caustic soda or soda ash for solubilize water repellent foreign matters, to repeat washing for removing such matters as the agent and the solubilized foreign matters adhering to the cloth, and finally to dry the washed cloth. In the finishing process, it is necessary to treat the cloth with a finishing agent dissolved or dispersed in water, to filter and finally to dry the cloth with the use of a drier. According to the kind of treatment, it is necessary further to fix the finishing agent to the cloth by a high temperature heat treatment.
However, it is the present status in such a treating process that the treating agent is costly, a large amount of heat is necessary for the reaction between the agent and the cloth, and a large size washing machine and a large amount of water are needed for removing foreign matters and treating agent from the cloth, thus large quantities of water resource and heat energy are consumed uneconomically.
Moreover, since the waste water from the washing machine contains unavoidably the treating agent, causing the problem of public pollution, its treatment needs large installation cost and personnel expenses. Thus, the conventional pretreatment and finishing of a cloth are not economical.
Under such circumstances, it has recently been proposed to subject a textile product such as a cloth to a low-temperature plasma treatment for desizing and sourcing, and further for finishing to make the textile product soft, water repellent, anti-electrostatic, anti-staining and so on.
However, low-temperature plasma treating apparatuses hitherto proposed are to transport a long textile product taken up on a shaft or a roll to another shaft or roll while the cloth is treated with low-temperature plasma in a batch. A taken-up long textile product is placed constantly in the low-temperature plasma atmosphere in a batch during operation. While both end parts of the textile product are exposed always to the low-temperature plasma atmosphere, the core parts of the textile product are in contact with the low-temperature plasma for the first time in transferring the textile product to the other shaft or roll. Therefore, there occurs such a trouble that the treatment cannot be done uniformly. That large amounts of gas and electric energy are consumed for maintaining the total interior of the batch to a low-temperature plasma atmosphere is another difficulty.